Tyler, admittedly, is maybe a bit giddy lately over her relationship, partly because The Lord of the Rings has kept her away from home so much.

"I think I felt more homesick than anybody else, just by nature of how my character is," she sighs. "The rest of the actors are all kind of together on this journey and my character is not."

Tyler plays Arwen, the paramour of Aragorn (played by Viggo Mortensen) in the epic story. The rest of the cast includes Elijah Wood, Cate Blanchett, and Ian McKellen. "I had no idea what I was taking on," Tyler continues. "I thought, Oh I can handle it, it's only a year out of my life. Then again, the thought of being employed for a year was really nice."

Tyler can't divulge much about the film for fear of being attacked by an army of hobbits (direcor Peter Jackson, anyway). She does say that her story line diverts from the letter of the book and instead is drawn from the trilogy's appendix. Tyler is in awe over how Jackson poured excruciatingly over every detail of the mythology surrounding the books, to the point they made the actorts learn a new language spoken by its characters-Elvish.

"It's an amazing thing, really," she gushes, "It's a legitimate language. There are only a certain amount of people in the world who can speak it, like Oxford professors and what not. It's such a beautiful language too, it's really brilliant." Asked to speak a few lines, Tyler obliges and though the words pouring out sound like gibberish, she speaks them delicately, fluidly, and it sounds like a gentler version of French done with a crisp New Zealand accent. Tyler translates, "I said, 'Now my Lord, winter has not yet come. Would you before your time leave your people?' And the last one I said was, 'I'll take him. I'm the fastest rider.'"